Bid / Proposal / Report templates

In the current economic climate every aspect of putting together a proposal or tender becomes critical. Submissions need to be engaging, professional and demonstrate attention to detail. The ability to produce faster and better looking proposals can give clients a real competitive edge.

May Gurney tender document produced in Word
working with Lloyd Northover

Buro Happold tender and proposal document
Working directly with Buro Happold

Templates can make it easier for multiple authors to collaborate and still produce sophisticate, branded documents.

We find that as well as producing the template clients often ask us to help clean up documents with content from existing sources  (i.e. not produced using the template) or simply to help produce extremely large documents.

Example of a bid template

Many clients need the ability to create complex large bid responses when under tight time constraints. To achieve a professional look clients frequently use an in-house design team to generate these responses using InDesign. Many clients have not thought is possible to create the same swish documents in Word – in all cases we have surprised our clients that we cannot only replicate their InDesign designs but we can also make it easy in Word with our well organised custom ribbons, easy to use dialog boxes and error checking so that macro buttons cannot be used in the wrong place (eg a sensible message is displayed when trying to insert a new image in as section that does not have the correct space for the image).

Only one template needed

A single template can be used for short 1-2 page reports as well as complex multi-page reports. Below is an example new document dialog box allowing the user to select the elements required for a new bid / submission document.

Well organised custom ribbons

As with all our template access to the bespoke styles and macros is via a client tab on the ribbon.

These client tabs contains a mixture of standard Word buttons and all the bespoke template style and macro buttons. They usually contain 95% of the Word tasks required by the user for editting their documents.

Different page / section layouts

Many bid documents have a number of different page layouts for different parts of the bid. For example two column pages for the main text area and single column pages for the appendix areas. Switching between these different layouts can be very difficult and tedious using standard word commands but with specialised macros this process can be done via a click of a button.

Picture placeholders

The insertion of images is usually the process users find really difficult especially when adhering to a strict design. To make this task easier we include a facility to insert pre-defined picture placeholder. These placeholders then contain double click macro buttons for the selection and automatic insertion of the picture, image or Excel chart.

Below is an example of the drop down list of different placeholders types that can be inserted into a page.

Below is an image of a page with a 'Bottom of page - 3 images' placeholder inserted, The user has inserted the three images using the 'double click to insert image' buttons. This macro allows the user to select the image and then automaticall inserts the image then resizes it to fit the placeholder and finally reset the placeholder to align the image(s) to the bottom of the page.

The client love this facility!

Want to see more

If you would like to have a live demonstration give Nikki a call on 01264 730450. We can do this now using WebEx or alternatively arrange a suitable time to come in and give a demonstration.

Look forward to helping you.